He paused by and by and passed his forefinger across his forehead,
brushing the sweat away from above his quiet eyes. He moistened the
tip of his thumb and slid it along the blade of his hemp hook--he
was using that for lack of a scythe. Turning, he walked back to the
edge of the brier thicket, sat down in the shade of a black walnut,
threw off his tattered head-gear, and, reaching for his bucket of
water covered with poke leaves, lifted it to his lips and drank
deeply, gratefully. Then he drew a whetstone from his pocket, spat
on it, and fell to sharpening his blade.

The heat of his work, the stifling air, the many-toned woods, the
sense of the vast summering land--these things were not in his
thoughts. Some days before, despatched from homestead to homestead,
rumors had reached him away off here at work on his father's farm,
of a great university to be opened the following autumn at
Lexington. The like of it with its many colleges Kentucky, the
South, the Mississippi valley had never seen. It had been the talk
among the farming people in their harvest fields, at the cross-
roads, on their porches--the one deep sensation among them since
the war.

For solemn, heart-stirring as such tidings would have been at any
other time, more so at this. Here, on the tableland of this unique
border state, Kentucky--between the halves of the nation lately at
strife--scene of their advancing and retreating armies--pit of a
frenzied commonwealth--here was to arise this calm university,
pledge of the new times, plea for the peace and amity of learning,
fresh chance for study of the revelation of the Lord of Hosts and
God of battles. The animosities were over, the humanities re-begun.